It's you and me: The story of a Pocket Monster Hunter
by shishiou
Summary: Pokemon/Monster Hunter crossover. Resulted angstier than I had intended. Trigger warning for violent themes and ruthless hunting. If you don't want to read depictions of Pokemon being hurt, it's best to steer clear of this one.
1. A heart so true

The icy air of the northeastern Kalos tundras shears through my skin with the cruelty of beastly claws. I make a mental note of this pain, name it, wrap it up in a little ball, and put it away. I've been sitting still in this spot for five days. I could stand fifty more, if need be. I'm no stranger to cold weather, and I've learned long ago that, when there's something you must do, you must pull through. Gaze lifted in an unfocused way, I keep conscious of everything, of the azure sky already starting to darken, of the ominous frozen mountains far away, of the low grass withering noiselessly. The thin shrubbery that gives my shelter a semblance of camouflage smells good, earthy with a trace of mint, but I eye it suspiciously as if it could at any moment grow living vines and strangle me senseless. It's not like me, being paranoid like this. After what happened, there shouldn't be any more of that… right? I shiver and, as if to mock my resolve, a sudden, persistent blast of the infamous cavewinds pierces every part of my body not sheltered in my Ninetales furcoat. I reach my warm canteen and take a sip of the "Hot Drink"—a permanently bubbling ooze extracted from the embergall glands of unevolved Magbys, currently being (carefully) farmed for this purpose—and decide that I must increase my fur coverage later. It took more than twenty months to gather all this gear—and, well, more than twenty years to learn how to _use_ all this gear—but there's always something to improve… It's too late to worry now. I relax deliberately in order to save psychic energy, and let the inner warmth of the queer intoxicating liquid burn through my veins. I snap my attention to focus and stay still, ten seconds, thirty, one minute, five, ten, sixty, each one of them passing without hurry, without past or future, with only the wide clear sky for company.

Then all sounds suddenly go quiet and an undefinable shimmer spreads over the air like thin iridescent dust, and I know it's here.

It's magnificent. Each of the eight branches of its antlers glitters in luminous colours, red and cyan and violet, and it moves with the grace and poise of the unicorns of myth, as if all Stantlers were just clumsy imitations made by some jealous, incompetent god. I've seen a few legendary beasts in my time, but looking at Xerneas right now, I think it's the most beautiful of all monsters—the most beautiful living thing in this world. According to my investigations, this one's must be the last of the species, too.

I don't take my eyes of it for a moment. Quietly, quietly, I draw my strop (a strip of rough Sharpedo hide, decorated with geometric patterns), lift an arrow from the floor, and give the tip a last-minute polish. I know I'll only get one chance, so the point must be absolutely sharp; it's crafted from the cold-steel fangs of a Mawile that I myself murdered (that thing bit right through my heavy Steelix armour; I ended up strangling it with my own hands before it could chew me like so many berries; when I close my eyes I can still picture the expression on his face—) _and_ coated in the most toxic of Garbodor sludges. I raise the bow: sturdy mega-Ampharos hairstring, flexible Kangaskhan composite bone-and-sinew traced with unholy unown runes, and a couple curse charms carved from the fearstones of Mismagii and the hollow eyes of Shedinjas. Always come prepared. Avoiding the (Staraptor) fletching, I nock the arrow on the string and pull it back all the way, charging a direct shot. Just as I raise the tip, the monster, with supernatural intuition, looks right at me with its clear eyes. There's an undefinable, timeless moment in the cold as we acknowledge each other, and—I release the shot. The arrow flies with dreadful speed and pierces right through the X of its pupils, as if they were a target in some game. The beast's shrill cry of pain and fear hurts my eardrums before I'm attacked with a terrible magic blast—but I was prepared for that too, and withstand the impact safely behind the cold metal of a large Shieldon plate. I'm nonetheless thrown to the ground as the beast gallops away.

That was part of the plan, too. It predictably heads northward for the safest crevice on the barren mountainscape, and I cover my ears: a few moments later the ground trembles under the blast of the gunpowder and poison bombs I had planted on its probable path. I run towards it noisily, making sure to be seen, and shoot a rain of the steelfanged arrows. The Xerneas stops and looks back unsurely and a cold shiver grips my spine and knots my stomach, but then it finally grows too startled and scared and runs away limping. I finally managed to bring it from fight to flight.

I head back, stash the bow, and take the greatsword.  
This thing doesn't deserve to be called a sword. It's more of a huge slab of raw metal.  
I wouldn't even be able to move it from the ground if it wasn't built from uncanny living steel.  
Its once-proud square spikes and blue gemshards still adorn and protect it even in this decayed shape.  
I strap the abomination to my back. I can't run like this, but I can walk.  
I suppress a sigh and set out into the night.

When a Xerneas moves, it touches the ground so lightly that it won't leave hoofprints, not even on snow. It will, however, leave a blood trail—if you put an iron arrow through its skull and blow half a dozen barrels of gunpowder under its legs. Tracking this one is trivial. I spot the monster as a bunch of lonesome, colourful rods topping some dark mass on the ground, glowing a soft blue aura wherever touched by the moonlight. It has failed to find proper shelter, though as I approach it I notice that small flowers are already sprouting from the unnaturally red blood, and what was once a random stretch of lifeless ground is already starting to feel like a holy grove.

The beast is asleep in its exhaustion. I circle it cautiously so that I'm able to look it in the face; I owe it as much. It has an expression of perfect peace, like a sleeping saint. I draw the greatsword, slide my left hand to the steel pommel, grip the ivory handle lightly with the right just below the guard and raise the blade over my head, holding it up there full of promises. I see all the stars there is to see and notice there are no clouds and, for a tenth of a second, wonder how come my cheeks seem to be wet—and I bring the blade down in a wide cutting motion, slashing cleanly through Xerneas' neck, splashing the snow broadly with a blood that shines red even in the dark of the night.

I thrust the greatsword in the ground and lean on it and breathe and stay there listening to the silence of the starry skies.

Then I draw a huntersknife and start hacking the horns loose.

My name is Red, and I am a Pokémon Hunter.


	2. A world we must defend

On the dirt of the village ground, framed by the creeping claws of half-withered, thorny weeds, two small snotty children were playing Pocket Monsters.

The game was like this. Each child carried with them some kind of critter, typically a horned beetle, which they cared for and tried to "train" in a childish, haphazard way. They didn't keep them literally in pockets—their crude Rattata-skin vests seldom had pockets at all—but rather used little cages they themselves built, tying together small sticks. Those bugs who survived the "training" were pitted against each other in a kind of arthropodic cockfighting. A small circle was drawn on the dirt, and whichever creature was first pushed outside, flipped over, or murdered, was the loser.

No one knew when and how did the children learn this sport. The sullen, silent adults seemed to be somehow bothered by it, but never said anything.

In that day's fight both bugs were common horned beetles, but they didn't seem very combative. They just stood there thinking their empty insect thoughts. Gold, sitting on a treestump, watched the battle with an indefinable melancholic expression, eyes vacant. He didn't even notice when the stranger started approaching, despite the fact that the man _should_, by all counts, stand out from the villagers like a Vivillon in the snow (_when have I last seen Vivillons?_). The stranger was, evidently, a hunter. He wasn't that older than Gold, perhaps three or four years, but somehow he _felt_ old as the mountains. Perhaps it was his sheer size; legs thick as pillars, arms twice the girth of Gold's, and a body so solid that even the absurdly large backpack didn't seem heavy on him; and all that mass was built from the broad, unstated, scarred muscles of someone who actually uses them, not the showy, anatomical muscles of a Bodybuilder (_what was a Bodybuilder again?_). Of course, all this deduction was beside the point—only a hunter would walk around in such expensive monsters' fur, with such an array of potions and herbs and strange hollow stones and thingamajigs hanging from belts and pockets and hooks, with that many amulets and charms and animal decorations and fangs and feathers and disturbing figures sculpted in ivorybone. He likely had an entire armoury packed in a box somewhere nearby, and probably spent most of his time gathering better materials and crafting better weapons, so that he could gather even better materials—that is, kill bigger beasts. Hunters, with their smell of sweat and gunpowder and tanned hide and dead things, made Gold sick. Sure, you had to fight the creatures to protect the village, and if you spotted one wandering nearby, you'd go after it, because it would attack the people sooner or later, and some of them were terrifyingly powerful, some of them preyed on children and dreams and souls, and when those were around, hired hunters were very welcome—but even then, the very idea of _humans_ going out to attack _monsters_ felt repulsive, villainous… inhuman.

As the large figure moved closer, Gold was taken by some old, deep fear, and wondered whether doing what monsters do—hunting—doesn't make you the same as them.

The man stopped by the battle-ring and stepped on both bettles at once, in a casual way, with a heavy lined Bouffalant-leather boot (_how do I know that?_). There was no way the bugs could have survived. The scrawny children—it was hard to decide whether they were boys or girls—froze in place, then grimaced and started crying all at once, staring accusingly at the stranger. The man returned the look, pointed toward his foot , lifted it, and kept pointing at the crushed bugslime and the battle-ring. The children went quiet and looked down in supressed silence, whimpering from time to time.

It was more than Gold could handle. "Who do you think you are", he snapped, "and why are you doing this to the kids? Get out of our village! You're not wanted here!" The man just looked at him saying nothing, and in that moment of cold and quiet, looking up at his bearded face, something that had been stirring in Gold's mind surfaced with such a shock that he felt dizzy. "I—I _know_ who you are. I _know_ you. You're… you're Red, right?"

The man kept looking, without any sign of reaction.

"That's right, you never said anything. Please, Red, please, talk to me." Gold was surprised at his own quavering voice but went on—"I've been sick, Red, many years sick, I woke up here after… what happened, and no one knows what it was, and I think of the old cities and of the monsters and I ask myself every day and I _have to know. _I know how hard it is for you but _talk to me_, Red."

The children watched attentively, forgetting about the beetles entirely. Red said nothing. It was rather hard to explain but he could somehow answer with silence, pressuring you into talking more.

"You always kept to yourself, always did everything alone, right? Look at you, all bloody and messy." Gold had the need to say hurtful things, but some back part of his mind noted that, even if a bit gruffy, Red was quite clean, and all his little bags and contraptions were distributed over his body in a careful, utilitarian layout. Gold made an effort to ignore this part of his mind. "Are you _that_ afraid of people, that after all those years you'd leave an old friend in the dark only to cater to the fear?" No reaction. Gold sat back down, the fight in him fizzing out fast. He sighted. "The only one you would ever talk to was… Green, right?", he half-whispered, but _now_ there was a reaction, though Red didn't look angry or sad as Gold expected, just weary. Red turned his back and started walking, slow and steady. He was the first sign Gold ever found of his old life, and he really, really wanted to go after him, but he didn't.

⁂

But after sunset, in the moonless night, when Gold lied sleeplessly on the straw mats and Piloswine blankets of his hut, he was suddenly aware of someone to his side, and somehow he wasn't afraid, and only after many minutes did Gold realize that he already knew who it was. Red slept so quietly that he could be dead, except life radiated from him like heatwaves. Gold didn't even think of waking him to ask questions but just stayed still, gaze lost on the bamboo ceiling, going again and again through the memories of his childhood, now much clearer than in the last years of dirt and snow and battling every day to survive.

⁂

When Gold woke up, the cloudy sky was already lit—at least, as lit as it ever got in these parts. Red had disappeared, but Gold found some objects left on his only table. There was what looked like a Shuckle shell, but on a closer look, had been fashioned into a handshield, the holes barred with some kind of bony plate that Gold couldn't identify. There was a short curved saber, which Gold recognized as a crafted Scythersblade, with a wooden grip and dark-green metal pommel. And there was some sort of loose-leaf notebook, with one of the leaves laid over the battered brown chamois cover.

He took the note. It read:

* * *

Gold, you are strong, but your body has become too thin.

Read this. I'll come back for it in two full moons.  
Before that, copy it. Memorize it. Learn it, and learn to handle a sword,  
and protect these people, and other people too. I have something I must do.

Red

* * *

He looked at the notebook. The cover read: "Hunter's Notes".

Almost like an afterthought on the note, just below the signature, Red had added:

"I must kill God."


End file.
